You Do All the Work

The pastor at 11pm

Somewhere tonight there is a pastor at a kitchen table, laptop open, sermon half finished for Sunday, trying to work out why the Easter banner will not upload to the church website. The builder software updated itself. The tutorial video is forty minutes long and describes a version of the tool he does not seem to have. The service time on the events page is still last year's, and he knows it, and knowing it is one more small weight at the end of a day that was already full.

No one assigned him this job. There was no vote, and it is not in his call documents. It arrived the way these tasks always arrive: the website needed a person, the church had no staff member whose role it was, and the pastor was the one who cared enough not to let it rot. Software vendors call what they sell self service, as if the service part were a feature. Somebody still has to build it, write it, photograph it, and fix it at 11pm. In most churches, that somebody is the pastor.

This is the fourth article in Tov's series, and it makes the case the others circle around: handing the website to a web team is not a convenience purchase. It is a stewardship decision about a finite and already strained resource, the pastor's hours and attention.

The job was already too big for one person

Start with the shape of the average church, because it explains why the website lands where it lands. The 2020 Faith Communities Today overview, a survey of 15,278 congregations from 80 faith traditions and the largest study of its kind in the United States, found that the median congregation has 65 people in weekly worship, down from 137 in 2000. Seventy percent of congregations have 100 or fewer weekly attenders, and only 10 percent have more than 250 (Faith Communities Today, Hartford Institute for Religion Research, 2021). At a median of 65 people, there is no communications department. There is often no administrator. There is a pastor, a handful of faithful volunteers, and a list of jobs that does not shrink to fit them.

For a large share of those pastors, ministry is not even the only job. The same Faith Communities Today research found that across all congregations, 24 percent of leaders serve part time and 14 percent serve without pay, and the smallest congregations are the most likely to have a part time, unpaid, or bivocational leader. Reporting the National Survey of Religious Leaders, Lifeway Research found that 35 percent of all U.S. clergy hold an additional job outside their congregational ministry, and among evangelical pastors the share is 47 percent, up from 28 percent in a comparable 2001 survey (Lifeway Research, 2025). For nearly half of evangelical pastors, then, the website is not a second job layered onto the first. It is a third.

Then consider the load those pastors already carry. Lifeway Research's May 2025 survey of 1,516 evangelical and Black Protestant pastors found that 67 percent feel they must be on call 24 hours a day, 57 percent say the role is frequently overwhelming, and 47 percent often feel the demands of ministry are greater than they can handle. The share who manage to unplug and take a day of rest at least once a week fell from 85 percent in 2015 to 78 percent in 2025 (Lifeway Research, 2025). A website that only the pastor can update is not a neutral tool in that picture. It is one more channel through which the church is always on, and he is always the person it is on through.

The emotional cost shows up in independent research as well. Duke University's Clergy Health Initiative, in its 2023 statewide survey of North Carolina United Methodist clergy, found that 46 percent scored high on emotional exhaustion, with anxiety symptoms in 15.7 percent and depressive symptoms in 10.3 percent (Duke Clergy Health Initiative, 2023). That is one denomination in one state, and it should be cited with that scope. It corroborates what the national pastor surveys report from the other direction: the exhaustion is measured, and it is not new.

Considered quitting: read the current number carefully

Barna's widely quoted finding on pastors considering quitting deserves careful handling, because the number has moved and old versions of it still circulate. Barna measured pastors who had seriously considered quitting full time ministry at 29 percent in January 2021, rising to 42 percent in March 2022. It then fell to 33 percent in data gathered in late 2023 for The State of Pastors, Volume 2, and Barna's latest release puts it at 24 percent, which Barna describes as stabilization rather than full recovery (Barna Group, 2022 and Barna Group, latest trends release). Any article still quoting 42 percent as the current figure is quoting the worst month of the pandemic era as if it were today. The honest figure is lower, and it is still one pastor in four.

What drives it matters more than the level. Among pastors who had considered quitting, 56 percent named the immense stress of the job as a reason, ahead of loneliness and isolation at 43 percent (Barna Group, 2022). And in Barna's more recent work with Gloo, just over 60 percent of pastors say they frequently or sometimes feel emotionally or mentally exhausted, down from nearly 75 percent a decade earlier (Barna Group, 2026). The picture across all of this research is not collapse. It is a workforce that stays, absorbs, and pays for the absorption slowly.

That last point is worth pressing, because it changes how a church should read its own pastor's silence. Lifeway's 2025 study found that only about 1.2 percent of pastors actually leave the pastorate each year apart from retirement or death, a rate statistically unchanged over a decade. Pastors mostly do not quit. They keep carrying the extra work, including the website, and the cost is registered in exhaustion and in the predecessor data Lifeway gathered in the same study: current pastors said 22 percent of their predecessors left because of burnout, double the 10 percent share reported ten years earlier (Lifeway Research, 2025). He is not fine because he has not resigned. He is a man who will do the website at 11pm rather than let the church look uncared for, which is exactly why someone should take it off his desk.

The problem is the structure of the week, not the strength of the man

Barna's recent analysis makes a point that could serve as this article's thesis. Satisfaction among pastors has fallen even as exhaustion has eased, and Barna attributes the gap not to a loss of calling but to the structure of the job: roles and responsibilities that do not align with a pastor's gifts, and an inability to delegate. In Barna's summary, pastors are not questioning the calling. They are questioning what they are asked to do each day (Barna Group, 2026).

Scripture is frank about this failure mode and its cure. In Exodus 18, Moses sits from morning to evening settling every dispute in Israel himself, and his father in law Jethro tells him plainly that the thing he is doing is not good, and that he will wear himself out, because the work is too heavy for one man. The cure Jethro prescribes is not a stronger Moses. It is delegation to able people who can carry the ordinary load, so Moses can give himself to the work only he can do. The New Testament repeats the pattern in Acts 6, where the apostles refuse to abandon prayer and the ministry of the word to wait on tables, and the church appoints others of good repute to carry a real and honored need. Neither passage treats delegation as a lack of devotion. Both treat doing everything yourself as a pastoral error with predictable consequences.

Paul's counsel about time runs the same way. "Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, making the best use of the time, because the days are evil" (Ephesians 5:15 to 16, ESV). Stewardship of time is not a productivity slogan. It is a recognition that a pastor's hours are a trust, spent either on the people and the Word he was called to, or on whatever urgent small task shouted loudest that week. Website maintenance is the definition of a task that shouts. It is never finished, it breaks at inconvenient hours, and it can always be done by the person who notices it, which is why it so reliably migrates to the pastor's evenings.

None of this means the website is unimportant. The other articles in this series argue the opposite: it is the front door, the first welcome, the source Google and AI tools read when a newcomer asks about churches in your town. A thing can be genuinely important and still be the wrong work for the pastor. Table service in Acts 6 fed widows; it mattered. It still was not the apostles' work. The website matters, and it is a task built for delegation, because its needs are regular, defined, and entirely carryable by someone else.

What handing it off has to mean to count

A warning belongs here, because many pastors have been handed off to before and found the work waiting for them in a new costume. A builder platform that gives the pastor a login, a tutorial library, and a support queue has not taken the work away. It has given the work a dashboard. The test of any arrangement, Tov's included, is simple: when the Easter service time changes, whose evening does it land in.

Real delegation of the website has a few marks.

• The pastor sends a message, and the work is done. A text or an email with the change, and a person at the other end builds it, checks it on a phone, and confirms it is live. No login, no editor, no tutorial.
• Writing is included. Most updates stall not on technique but on wording. A web team that will only paste in finished copy has left the hardest half of the job with the pastor.
• The routine is owned, not requested. Seasonal times, holiday schedules, staff changes, and stale pages are caught by a rhythm of review, not by the pastor remembering at 11pm.
• Urgent means urgent. A funeral notice, a weather closure, a corrected time. There is a way to reach the team and a promise about how fast it moves.
• The pastor's remaining role is approval, not production. He reads, he corrects, he decides. Those are a pastor's proper functions toward his church's public voice. Building the banner is not.

Tithe.ly sells you software. That is a sentence from Tov's homepage, and it is worth explaining rather than merely repeating. Software is a tool the church operates. A web team is a group of people who do the work. For a pastor whose congregation has a gifted volunteer with time and skill, software may be enough, and this article is not an argument that every church must pay for help. It is an argument that the work should be named honestly, counted honestly against the pastor's week, and carried by someone, and that where no such volunteer exists, paying a modest monthly fee for a team is a defensible, even careful, use of a church's money compared with spending its pastor.

The quiet conclusion

Your pastor will not ask the church to take the website off his plate. The same conscientiousness that put it there will keep it there, at the cost of evenings, rest, and eventually health, while the surveys above record the trend in aggregate. Churches that love their pastor can do for him what Jethro did for Moses: name the load, call it too heavy for one man, and arrange for able people to carry the parts that were never his to carry alone.

If you want the website carried by a web team, with updates handled by text or email and your evenings returned to you, Tov will build you a free demo of your homepage, and you can judge it before you spend anything.